Threnody for Little Red Riding Hood
by Trivial Pursuit
Summary: She may play at being the little girl in the red hood but she knows she'll always be the wolf underneath.
1. Pearls

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes

-V, _V for Vendetta_

She's born out of blood and fire, like a Phoenix in the ashes of her late parents.

(She's Natalia Romanova, age five-and-two-quarters, and one day the world will be her oyster.)

There's men with needles and women with false smiles (She learns the difference between _le vrai et le faux_ quite early on), guns and ballet slippers, ink stained fingers and blood stained floors, there's vicious madams and soldiers of the cold. No one is permanent and she learns not to get attached. She's pitted against those who they tell her are her allies and they all fall, one by one (And sometimes by two) around her. Her little pawn is crossing the bored, one square closer to becoming a queen. Her life is worth nothing but her body, full of serums and conditioning, is worth a Tsar's ransom. The bloody red of the flag that she serves matches the scarlet she'll never be able to wash off her hands. She kills and lies for killers and liars and calls it what it isn't: Justice, duty, retribution, _life_. Love has no place in the Red Room.

(She's Number 5331111, age ten-and-three-quarters, and all she desires are pearls.)

There are cities and towns and little outposts of civilization and places so far off the map that they don't really even exist except in her memories. There are mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, children and lovers and friends and foes. She kills them all, kills them in the name of _Materii Rossii_ and the _Krasnaya komnata_. She kills them but she honours them, remembers their names and faces, the way they screamed, begged, or were completely silent as they died. So that she can always remember the high cost of living. Death will not be kind, not to her.

(She's the _Chernaya Vdova_, age eighteen, and the world is within her grasp.)

She thinks of the blood unnecessarily spilt, of the comrades who have died defending ideals that are not their own. She think of the red that simply gushes from her ledger, red that will never be erased, no matter how many good deeds she performs, no matter how much she drowns in regret and guilt. She kills and lies for killers and liars but she can't bring herself to call it what it isn't anymore.

(She's Natasha Romanoff, age twenty-five, and she's prised the world with her bare hands.)

When her boss presents her with an opportunity that seems to be a surefire way to wipe out all that red and then some she jumps at the chance, even though she knows it's too good to be true. Babysitting a narcissistic billionaire and make sure he doesn't kill himself yet. It's easy, simple, child's play. Yet she enjoys it, she can playact at being something she will never be allowed to be. Stable. Normal. She doesn't enjoy spending time with Tony Stark but she finds him refreshing to be around. She sees the same haunted look in his eyes as the one she sees in the mirror, albeit to a lesser degree.

'Why do you do this?' He asks her later, after all is said and done.

'I've got red in my ledger that I want to erase.' He smiles a sad little smile, the asshole billionaire façade melting away to show, for a brief second, a broken, child-like, shell of a man. She'll never tell him this but she knows he understands her desire to purge any traces of crimson from her ledger, the disgust at the fear and meaningless death she has wrought.

(She's Natalie Rushman, age twenty-seven, and the world's pearls are the only thing worth having.)

She is and always has been a creature in control, even when she isn't really in control of what is happening to her she still maintains an aura of self-possession that make even those pulling her strings believe she does everything by her own free will.

So when she meets _him_, a being so obviously aware of his own complete _lack_ of control she's _fascinated_, fascinated and more then a little frightened. Because he's got perfect control, perfect control that absolutely _reeks_ of someone whose welfare is completely dependent on uncontrollable factors. Watching him change is terrifying, while she'd known he was Dangerous she'd never really thought about exactly how dangerous was _Dangerous_. She shies away from him after that, afraid of him, a variable in the equation that she has absolutely no control over.

The worst part is he hides from her, treats her as if she's repulsed by him, apologizing whenever he can, which makes her want to scream. It's not his fault it's _her's_, she forced him out of Kolkata, forced him into a situation that breaks his perfect control. His long-desired contentment was disrupted by a need that has completely destroyed him.

A man calls her 'Red' once, and she knows he's talking about her hair, yet she can't help but think how appropriate the nickname is. Red is the colour of the ink in her ledger. Red is the colour of the flags she serves. Red is the colour of the love she will never give. Red is the colour of the womb that birthed her. She may play at being the little girl in the red hood but she knows she'll always be the wolf underneath.

When her Hawk comes back to her he no longer trusts her as he once did. She feels as if she's flinging him out the window, crying '_Fly little birdie, fly!_'. He is broken an so she tries to fix him, as he had done for her all those years ago. But all she does is break him more since the only thing her hands are meant for is destruction. She does not deserve his trust.

(She's the Black Widow, age twenty-eight, and suddenly all the world's pearls don't seem to be worth so much any more.)

As the Widow lies dying she thinks back to a chilly November a few months before her parents died. The Berlin Wall is crumbling, Gorbachev is leaving the Kremlin for his last hurrah, and revolution of an entirely different kind then that of the equally frigid November seventy-two years ago is in the air. As her father stares at the newspaper a few tears slide down his cheek. Her mother collects her family in her arms and rubs soothing circles on her father's back.

'Do not cry. We are Russian, regimes fall every day.'

(She's Natashenka, age five, and she knows nothing of pearls)

When she dies, she dies alone because no matter how much those men loved her she will always tell you that love is for children and the Black Widow was never a child. It doesn't matter if she's Nasya Rykova, age thirty-five or Nicola Reynolds, age ninety-five. She's always alone.

(Her pearls are all she has left.)


	2. Matryoshka

She dances across the floor, spinning around and round and round and round. Her feet barely graze the floorboards, the music filling the space around her like oxygen (_She likes to tell herself she needs nothing else for life. She likes to lie._)

_The boy. She refuses to know that he is the first of many. She doesn't care (Why should she?). He sees it coming and she is not sure if that is a mercy or a cruelty._

Her feet scream as time flies by and the record is restarted by someone she did not know was watching, but she does not care. Her shoes are stained with blood. (_For once it is her own._)

_He smiles and offered her a chocolate._

She likes her lessons, likes learning abou tsars and tsarinas, even when her instructors tell her they were sinful and cruel. She likes to imagine herself a _Velikaya Kniaginya_, dancing across the marble floors of the Imperial Palace she's only seen a handful of times from a distance. Princes from across the continent would fall to their knees at her stunning beauty and beg her father, the Tsar, for her hand.

_She likes his smile._

Her Mama calls her Natashenka and tells her she is beautiful. She wants to be like Mama, strong, steady, beautiful. Her Papa yells and screams so she curls up into a ball in the corner of the room like her mama taught her. He is neither strong, nor beautiful, his face and body disfigured by the wars. She is told he is a noble hero and that makes her proud, but sometimes, in the recesses of her mind traitorous seeds of doubt germinate.

_She takes the chocolate._

Mama scrimps on food and takes her to _Coppélia_ for her fifth birthday. Natashenka wants dance across the stage just as effortlessly at the ballerina she saw that night.

_She slides out the knife that the Madame had given her earlier in the day._

_Then they are both gone and in their places are strange men with false smiles, who lead her through cold rooms that reek of Nothing._

_It is fast and painless. He deserves that, she thinks._

For the first time in her life she has her own room and she can't breathe, she misses the sound of her Mama's singing whenever Papa is out.

_Blood sprays across the snow and the boy falls dead at her feet._

_There are lessons, hard lessons; languages, womanly arts, guns, knives, explosives, forging, strategy, chess, hand-to-hand combat. She likes this the best. It reminds her of dancing and she can pretend she is a famous ballerina._

_The sliver of the blade is speckled with blood._

Sometimes if she is very good at her lessons she doesn't have to pretend and they let her dance for real.

_The chocolate melts in her mouth._

She loves to dance so she is very good. She will do anything to dance.

He has blue eyes, the same as her own.

They tell her she is no longer Natashenka, that Natashenka is a name of love and 'Love is for children Natalia and you don't want to be a child, do you? You're a big girl now.'

_He is only a few years older then herself._

She whirls across the worn floorboards until her classmates want to throw up, but all she wants is to go faster, stronger, better.

_The Madame smiles when she returns with the knife, and pats her on the head._

For her twelfth birthday the Madame gives her a pair of pointe shoes and lets her dance. A man who reminds her of her own Papa comes later and puts needles in her arms.

_She moves faster now, she's stronger, better. They talk of Missions and Espionage but all she can think of is Dance._

_Then they send her on missions and she is no longer allowed this small pleasure._

_A woman cries as she pulls the trigger and red spatters across the wall._

_A man collapses as she tosses out her syringe._

She eighteen and she is too old for this world.

_She feels the cool metal of a silencer touch the back of her neck and she lets out a breath, opening her eyes wide. She is waiting for something but she's not sure what._

_A man who she's never met before makes a Call and she is still alive._

_They keep her caged, sometimes in rooms with bars and sometimes in fancy glass ones that make her wonder exactly who she's dealing with. There are orange suits that itch and shackles that she could get out of with a rip and twist of her slightly too long nails but doesn't. The man who made the Call comes and visits her every day. His name is Clint._

_A man with an eyepatch and a face that tells a hundred stories finally comes into the interrogation room after almost a year of talking to people who she knows almost everything about but still know nothing about her. He does not smile, growl, sneer, belittle. He simply appraises her with an eye that tells a hundred lies._

_'They call you the Black Widow.' It's not a question._

_'They call me many things.' Her accent is thick, she does not bother to mask it._

_'What's your name?' It's not a question either, it's an order._

_'You know, that's the first time anyone's asked me that. They all call me 'Miss' or 'Ma'am', it's quite irritating. However, you already know, so what's the point?' His face betrays no twitch but she can tell much more about a man from much less, 'Oh, you don't. Well, that's a surprise. You can call me Natasha, Natasha Romanoff.' She knows that he knows that it's not her real name, but S.H.I.E.L.D. won't touch that piece of her._

She is endless and she is so tired.

_She is put on missions, baby ones, ones that she's been doing with her eyes closed since she was ten. She bears it as best she can._

_The psychologists tell her she is unbalanced, in denial. She's not though._

_They don't understand, they don't see. They can't, they won't._  
_They don't See the carnage. They don't Feel the blood. They don't Taste the smoke. They don't Smell the gunpowder. They don't Hear the screams. They can't comprehend the sheer beauty._

_She protects Natashenka from the Vdova and the Vdova protects them both from the world. The world that is full of snakes, birds, and spiders ready to strike and hurt them._

When the dreams come at night she calls for her papa, she knows that he would protect her. She does not know who she calls for.

_Because Alian Romanov might have been Natalia Romanova's father, but Anton Vanko was the Black Widow's. But she is neither Natalia nor the Widow, she is Natasha, and whose child is Natasha?_

_Maybe Natasha's papa is S.H.I.E.L.D., the people who took in the Widow and spat out Natasha. Or maybe she is her own papa, she creates herself. She does not know anymore, for everyone else clearly defined by genetics and love, but not for she._

_She feels a kinship towards Ivan Vanko, he is the son of the Vdova's father and so he is her brother. She never gets a chance to tell him this though. He dies and the family she finds in gone again._

_And maybe that's her problem, that she's constrained by blood and water. Maybe that's why she can't find family._

_But she knows these are all lies._

_Natasha is nothing. She is a construct, synthesized by circumstance and realised by fear. She is simply an imaginary friend._

_For this she hates the man they call Captain America, he, who despite his similar parentage, does not have these problems, he has his father and his mother and he has the Starks and Dr Erskine. He has a family, forged of both blood and chemistry and she loathes him for it. He, who has everything she has ever desired, and so she takes from him, steals what scraps of his life that she can, his friend, the one they call the Winter Soldier, Tony Stark, his country, and she destroys them. She doesn't set out to, but everything she touches invariably turns to ash and as do they._

_Clint cannot penetrate her layers but he still holds out a hand for her to take, and she does (Sort of.). She takes it with a finger first, not daring to trust him with her whole hand. But slowly, she extends another finger and then another and eventually there is something that is the closest she's ever gotten to trust._

She finds in this new country she can do as she was not previously allowed to do. On her birthday she goes to the ballet. The first year she sees The Firebird, the next Swan Lake. And it is not Russia, age five, but it is something.


	3. Amo

_'I love you.'_

Such a simply phrase to be bandied about without thinking of the meaning behind those three word, three syllables, eight letters, two pronouns and a verb. Essentially nothing, easily broken down.

_'Ya lyublyu tebya.'_

Her mother language, the one that flows easiest off her tongue. It's what her mother used to say to her before she left for work each morning and what she whispered each night as she went to sleep. Five syllables this time, still three words, fourteen letters. So, really, nothing.

_'Je t'aime.'_

French this time. The language of love, so really it should be _something_. Seven letters, one apostrophe, two syllables, two words. But it's no more auspicious then anything else said in French.

_'Te amo.'_

Latin, the root of all Romance languages, and they always say that the first's the best, so, theoretically, it should be the most romantic of all. But it's not. Two words, three syllables, five letters. Analysed and broken down into nothing.

_'Ich liebe dich.'_

German. Three words, three syllables, eleven letters. It isn't known as a romantic language, certainly not one to be picked for wooing. But Natasha's always liked German, the way everything is exact and precise, how you can always say exactly what you mean. But it doesn't really work either, does it?

_'Wǒ ài nǐ'_

Traditional Chinese. The phrase is composed of three syllables and three characters.

_'Miqvarkhar.'_

Georgian, one word, ten letters. It's straight, to the point, but somehow _lacking_.

_'Ja liubliu ciabie.'_

Belarusian, three words, fifteen letters, still analysable and breakable.

_'Kocham cię.'_

Polish. Three syllables, two words, nine letters. Still nothing.

_'Seni seviyorum.'_

Turkish. Four syllables, thirteen letters, two words.

They are so little, these three, two, one words that mean so much to us. They have stopped meaning anything to Natasha, they are merely words, like any other, to be twisted and used to manipulate her surroundings. But somehow, those three, two, one little words mean everything when the right person whispers them in her ear, when they casually twine their fingers with her and tug on her hand, when they scream it at her in the middle of a fight, when they murmur it in her ear as she wakes up in the morning and before she goes to sleep.

_'I love you.'_


	4. Paracosm

When she was little, before the Incident, she had a doll named Alina. The doll was a cheap thing, made of carved wood and salvaged rags, with bits of black wool for hair, but she was _Natalia's_ doll, made for her by her Babushka. Alina was many things, a Tsarina, a spy, an engineer, an explorer, a revolutionary, a writer, a student, a mother, a soldier. She was Natalia's escape.

The fireplace is the door to Hell which Alina the Spy had to skirt as the evil Mister Smith tried to push her into its firey depths. The kitchen counter is the fifth floor apartment Alina the Engineer had to live in as she worked to better the lives of the proletariat. The windowsill was the freezing Arctic ledge that Alina the Explorer had to cross the reach safety. The patch of floor next to Natalia's bed is a grand court where Tsarina Alina holds court and helps her people fight cruelty. The dusty spot next to the coal scuttle is where Alina the Revolutionary rallies her troops to crush the greedy bourgeoisie.

Natalia created a world, filled with sidekicks named Roman, Fyodor, and Irina, lovers called Mikhail, Leonid, and Josef, and villians like Mister Smith and Baroness Von Fuester. She built worlds, characters, countries, adventures, lives, everything right down to their favourite colour. She plans who they fall in and out of love with, what they wear, what they like and dislike, who they'e friends with, who they hate. She, in her narrow purview of the world, lives through them, they do the things she only dreams of, they allow her to see the world without leaving her parents' apartment.

Her mother used to jokingly complain that Natalia used to spend more time in her imaginary world then in reality. Madame Romanova would smile sadly and indulge her daughter these little things; a fantasy world was so little to give when so many of the little delights she'd had when she herself was a child were not allowed or far to expensive for the already stretched salary of a factory worker.

When her family's apartment goes up in flames Alina burns with it, her little wood body shrinking into nothing. With the doll goes Natalia's world. She's a big girl, she has to live in the real world now.


End file.
